Nonsupplanting Requirement

State, local, or tribal funds budgeted to pay for sworn officer positions irrespective of the receipt of CHRP grant funds may not be reallocated to other purposes or refunded as a result of a CHRP grant being awarded. Non-federal funds must remain available for and devoted to that purpose, with CHRP funds supplementing those non-federal funds. Funding awarded cannot be obligated until after the grant award start date. This means that CHRP funds cannot be applied to any agency cost prior to the award start date. In addition, your agency must take active and timely steps pursuant to its standard procedures to fully fund law enforcement costs already budgeted as well as fill all locally-funded vacancies resulting from attrition during the life of the grant.

Why This Condition:

The COPS statute nonsupplanting requirement mandates that grant funds may not be used to replace state or local funds (or, for tribal grantees, Bureau of Indian Affairs funds) that would, in the absence of federal aid, be made available for the grant purposes. Instead, CHRP grant funds must be used to increase the total amount of funds that would otherwise be made available for hiring and/or rehiring law enforcement officers.

What You Should Do:

Grant recipients may not reduce their sworn officer budget just to take advantage of the CHRP grant award. Any budget cuts must be for fiscal reasons unrelated to the receipt of CHRP grant funds to avoid a violation of the nonsupplanting requirement.

Grant recipients may not reduce their locally-funded number of sworn officer positions during the three-year CHRP grant period as a direct result of receiving the CHRP funding to pay for additional officers. Reductions in locally-funded sworn officer positions that occur for reasons unrelated to the CHRP funding—such as city-wide budget cuts, for example—do not violate the nonsupplanting requirement, but recipients must maintain documentation demonstrating the date(s) and reason(s) for the budget cuts to prove that they were unrelated to the receipt of CHRP grant funding in the event of an audit, monitoring site visit, or other form of grant compliance review.

Under CHRP, the nonsupplanting requirement means that a grant recipient receiving CHRP grant funds to hire a new officer position, including filling an existing officer vacancy that is no longer funded in the recipient’s local budget, must hire the additional position on or after the official grant award start date, above its current budgeted (funded) level of sworn officer positions.

The nonsupplanting requirement also means that a grant recipient that receives CHRP funds to rehire an officer who had already been laid off at the time of application as a result of state, local, or tribal budget cuts, must rehire the officer on or after the official grant award start date. The grant recipient must maintain documentation in its CHRP grant file showing the date that the position was laid off and rehired.

In addition, the nonsupplanting requirement means that a grant recipient that receives CHRP grant funds to rehire an officer who was, at the time of application, scheduled to be laid off on a future date as a result of state, local, or tribal budget cuts, must continue to fund the officer with its own funds through the grant award start date until the date of the scheduled lay-off. [For example, if the award start date is July 1 and the lay-off is scheduled for November 1, then the COPS funds may not be used to fund the officer until November 1, the date of the scheduled lay-off.] Your agency must have identified the date(s) of the scheduled lay-offs and the number of officers to be laid off in its application. Grant recipients must maintain documentation showing the date(s) and reason(s) for the lay-offs, the number of officers laid off, the number of officers rehired, and the dates the officers were rehired. [Please note that as long as your agency can document that the lay-offs would occur on the identified dates if the CHRP grant funds were not available, it may transfer the officers to the CHRP funding on or immediately after the date of the lay-off without formally completing the administrative steps associated with a lay-off for each individual officer.]

Documentation that may be used to prove that scheduled lay-offs or budget cuts are occurring for local economic reasons that are unrelated to the availability of CHRP grant funds may include (but are not limited to) council or departmental meeting minutes, memoranda, notices, or orders discussing the lay-offs; notices provided to the individual officers regarding the date(s) of the lay-offs; and/or budget documents ordering departmental and/or jurisdiction-wide budget cuts. These records must be maintained with your agency’s CHRP grant records during the grant period and for three years following the official closeout of the CHRP grant in the event of an audit, monitoring, or other evaluation of your grant compliance.